China's civil service

Aspiring mandarins

Testing time for college graduates

“A HEALTHY society cannot come about when people study not for the purpose of gaining wisdom and knowledge but for the purpose of becoming government officials.” When Ye Shi, a Chinese philosopher, bemoaned this 800 years ago, China had already been choosing officials for hundreds of years on the basis of exams that required rote learning of ancient classics. The exams are different now but Ye would still have much to complain about.

Growing numbers of Chinese graduates aspire to join China's massive bureaucracy. On December 5th over 1m would-be mandarins spent a Sunday sitting the annual civil-service exam. Many of them had not planned to get a government job when they entered university. But college enrolment in China has boomed in recent years (see chart). New graduates face a brutally tight jobs market.

In July nearly 28% of this year's graduates had failed to find work. Many who have are disappointed with their wages. A recent study by Cai Fang, an economist, found that average starting salaries for college graduates hardly changed between 2003 and 2008. They are nowadays comparable to the steadily rising wages of uneducated migrant workers.

In this environment, government jobs become even more attractive. The pay is not great, but it is offset by job security and good welfare benefits. Competition, however, is fierce. This year there were 16,000 jobs on offer, one for every 64 test-takers. There were nearly 5,000 applications for the most sought-after post, that of “energy conservation and technology equipment officer”.

Shu Fang of Renmin University says the departments that attract the most interest are the ones seen as most powerful or influential. These include the Ministry of Public Security, whose jobs include rounding up dissidents as well as ordinary criminals, and the Ministry of State Security, a spy agency. Another popular choice, he says, is the Ministry of Personnel, which administers the civil-service test and arranges government employment.

Jessica Zhang of Beijing Foreign Studies University, who applied for a job this year in the foreign ministry, says she found the multiple-choice general knowledge questions easier than she expected. But she was caught unawares by the written section, which required several essays about management of the Yellow River.

Some worry that the craze for government jobs may be bad for business. But Mr Shu says surprises like the one for Ms Zhang are good tests of bureaucratic talent. He says that civil-service exams, unlike in imperial days, “emphasise thinking and innovation and not just repeating the same old thing”. Some consolation for Ye Shi.